Archive for June, 2010

When Apple announced earlier this month that it was releasing a new Mac mini that featured an improved design and far better specs than what was previously available, I was excited. As a long-time Apple customer, I have everything from an iMac to an iPhone to an Apple TV running in my house. But as Apple continues to call the Apple TV a "hobby," I'm left wondering if it's really true.

Blue Microphones, as their name suggests, are generally all about the audio, and they've a strong reputation among musicians for the quality of their hardware. The Blue Microphones Eyeball 2.0 takes the distinctive Blue Snowflake and discretely adds a pop-out 2.0-megapixel webcam; once we'd finished popping the lens in and out of its spring-loaded silo we set to work reviewing it.

New Android 3.0 Gingerbread details have emerged, courtesy of notorious mobile industry insider Eldar Murtazin of mobile-review and his Russian-language Digestive podcast. According to Murtazin - handily translated by UnwiredView - we can expect Gingerbread in mid-October 2010 with the first handsets preinstalled with the new OS arriving in November/December. They'll be impressive beasts, too; minimum hardware requirements are apparently a 1GHz processor, 512MB of RAM, and a 3.5-inch screen or larger, with up to 1,280 x 760 resolution displays supported on 4-inch or bigger handsets.

As notebook markets go, the 15.6-inch segment is probably the most hotly contested; manufacturers are forced to look to gaming, multimedia or battery longevity in order to differentiate their wares. Gateway's NV59C09u picks HD video as its forte, squeezing in a Blu-ray drive as standard together with easy connectivity for your HDTV. Check out the full SlashGear review after the cut.

If Apple is looking for help with their iPhone 4 antennas, they could do worse than call on Anandtech. Faced with ongoing confusion over the signal strength issue, together with Apple's claims that the smartphone has the best antenna performance of an iPhone to-date, they managed to hack their iPhone 4 to show signal strength in dB rather than generic bars.

German internet provider 1&1 has outed a new Android-based tablet for its home subscribers, a 7-inch touchscreen slate with WiFi b/g/n and the ability to use a USB 3G modem. The 1&1 SmartPad will come preconfigured with various Android apps, including a digital photo frame viewer, ebook reader and weather widgets, and be sold alongside an optional dock with a remote control and subwoofer.

Hot warranty water for Dell today, as recently unsealed lawsuit papers reveal the company not only knew PCs on sale between 2003 and 2005 were likely to suffer specific hardware failures, but that they attempted to fob off the University of Texas by claiming the school's mathematicians had pushed the machines too hard with their tricky sums. The hardware failure was down to capacitors sourced from Nichicon, which had begun to leak chemicals and even burst; Dell, however, chose to "emphasize uncertainty" and told their salespeople "don't bring this to customer's attention proactively" before replacing the broken motherboards with others using the same faulty components.

If at first you don't succeed, call in the troops and try again. New job listings for antenna engineers have gone live on Apple's site, with several being posted this past month. Among the positions are "RF Systems Validation Engineer" for the iPhone, focussed on testing the various radios the smartphone now contains, together with "Antenna Engineer" for the iPad and iPhone, designing new antenna systems. The postings come as Apple faces criticism over the iPhone 4's reception.

One of the things that I really wish the iPhone could do is providing track control via Bluetooth devices. As the iPhone is from, the factory you can listen to streaming music over Bluetooth, but you can’t change tracks using controls on Bluetooth devices.